It's been a long summer of fun out of the country for me. Some time off, some time away from the 'usual' and a time to go a bit lighter on work and time in front of the computer - just what the doctor ordered. Now it's back to reality and the catching up which invariably is left behind by 3 months of physical absence and putting off some work related stuff.

The time off's been well spent. As I mentioned in a previous post about development cycles, I'd reached my burnout phase and it'd had been nagging at me pretty hard since the beginning of the year. So this year I decided it's time to get away from the rat race for a while to refresh the spirit, enthusiasm and creativity a bit by getting away and going back to the motherland.

As a result I spent the summer in Europe traveling to Switzerland to visit my girlfriend Nadia. We spent a good time of these 3 months routing through central Europe, visiting my parents in Berlin, hanging out in a German Western Ranch (imagine that <g>) for a while and criss crossing Switzerland and Italy stomping through mountains, ramparts and castles and 'schlemming' our way through it all.  Oh yeah, and finding some really shitty windsurfing <g>...

I just put up a ton of photos on my photo site (more on Nadia's photo album),  in case you want to take a peek, although the pictures haven't been all sorted and captioned yet. Lots of fun stuff looking back and that's not the half of it <g>.

To be fair to Nadia though - this wasn't an all entertainment vacation either - I had a 4 week contract assignment in Geneva spread out over the beginning and end of the trip, which actually turned out to be a really fun, if  intense and draining experience, working with a really fun bunch of folks. A conversion to Web project which required some really fun and dynamic AJAX functionality that turned out to be a very close match to the kind of stuff I've been building for the last half a year, so this assignment was a wonderful match/experience in applying some new tools and technologies in a real world environment with very rapid and efficient results - in short the kind of project one can only hope for.

But now - well now it's back to the grind. I'm just digging myself out of a mountain of mail and 3 months of back mail is REALLY a mountain. People are calling non-stop since I've been back yesterday throwing a backlog of requests my way which is strangely comforting, knowing that I can get away for a bit and not lose those trusty folks and that those same folks were kind enough not to bother me to much while I was on sabbatical. How lucky is that?

Now the real question is - where to start? There are so many things to do, so many things to catch up with and it's hard to decide where to start. But the good news is that I am full of energy now - re-charged and ready to charge which is quite the change from when I left. The trick now will be to harness that enthusiasm properly and not let it diffuse on too much diversity of the things that are on my list. Wish me luck - because it's so damn easy to get distracted.

Like writing this entry or putting photos on the site. <g> Back to work already...